One True Thing
by more-than-words
Summary: "...we make up for the secrets with a truth of something else. We tell each other something to remind ourselves what matters." Elizabeth struggles with not being able to tell Henry about her work with the CIA. Written for the fic exchange.


This is for the fic exchange for the prompt 'Elizabeth is still at the CIA and struggles with not being able to tell Henry about work'. It got a bit weird but I hope it's OK and isn't too far off the mark of the prompt!

* * *

 **One True Thing**

For the most part it isn't so much an outright lie as it is a lie of omission, but there's no denying the fact that the secrecy doesn't sit well with Elizabeth. The CIA recruitment process has been long and involved and when the day comes that she can finally tell Henry about her application to join the agency, it seems that the secrecy doesn't really sit well with him, either.

"Wait, how long has this been going on?" he loudly says in response to her telling him she has been having interviews at Langley and has just accepted a position doing intelligence analysis.

She can't quite meet his eyes when she answers, "A few months."

Seven months, to be precise. Seven months since one of her UVA professors took her to one side and introduced her to a man who encouraged her to apply to the CIA because she had been _noticed_. Seven months since she had wanted to run home to tell Henry about the absurdity of the whole thing, of the idea of her being a _spy_ , but she had been sworn to secrecy and so when she had arrived home late that day after talking to the Company man, she had instead told Henry she had been at the library.

It has mostly been a lie of omission, but some real lies have crept in there out of necessity.

 _Necessity_. God. She never thought she'd feel like that about secrets and lies.

"So basically you've been lying to me for months," Henry says, sounding bitter and hurt and like he's closing himself off from her.

"I wasn't _allowed_ to say anything until now," she retorts, even as she can feel dread starting to circle in the pit of her stomach at the expression on Henry's face. He looks furious. Elizabeth brushes her thumb over the engagement ring that sits on her finger, and fervently hopes she won't have to take it off if Henry can't bring himself around to what she has just told him. Henry is everything to her.

"Will you be allowed to tell me about what you're working on?" he asks, and while he's still sounding somewhat hostile, at least it seems he is trying to process what she has told him.

She shrugs. "I think it depends." It's a cagey response to avoid having to give the real one: _not really, no._

In with the dread she feels is a creeping sense of annoyance and she has to hold her tongue to stop herself from biting out what it is so tempting to say; that Henry keeps his secrets, too. There is so much about his work with the Marines that she doesn't know, can't know, so much he hasn't told her about what he did while he was on deployment for the very good reason that he isn't allowed to tell her. Her working for the CIA is different but not that different. Elizabeth tells herself though that she and Henry are above that sort of tit for tat argument and so she forces herself to keep quiet, at least until she knows what Henry really thinks.

To her eternal relief, he gets there himself a moment later. "I suppose it means we'll both have secrets in our work," he admits.

"Yeah." Elizabeth sighs, glad he has got it without having to have a barnstorming row about it first. But she can't shift the sadness she feels at not being able to share her work with her fiancé, and from his expression she thinks he might share her feelings.

Then Henry's lips twitch up at the corners. "You're gonna be a spy."

She can feel her own smile starting in return in spite of herself. "Yeah."

"That's so awesome, babe." He reaches out and tangles his fingers with hers. There's still a gap between them but at least they're connected now. "I'm so proud of you. You're going to be great at it."

Elizabeth lets out a breath she hadn't realised she was holding. "Thanks," she says, squeezing Henry's hands gently. "For what it's worth, Henry, I don't like the secrets. I don't like that I've had to keep this from you."

His grip tightens on her fingers and pulls her into him, her body flush against his. "Here's what we do," he says. "We're going to have to keep things separate from each other sometimes. But we make a deal. When you have to keep something from me, or I have to keep something from you, we make up for the secrets with a truth of something else. We tell each other something to remind ourselves what matters." Henry's arms slip around her and he smiles down at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "So tell me something true."

"One true thing?" she says, mostly to buy time as she thinks what she should say.

"Yeah." His arms flex around her. "One true thing."

She knows he means it to be a good thing but it still feels to be something of a test, a subtle reminder that their relationship will now always need to dance around the things they can't discuss. Elizabeth tells him the only true thing that feels like it really matters in the circumstances: "I love you."

* * *

Eighteen months later and she's arriving home from a trip overseas, her first mission abroad with the Company. She's only been away for ten days but it feels like it has been much longer.

Stepping into the cosy apartment she shares with her new husband feels like stepping into an entirely different life – in many ways actually is an entirely different life. Here in their home, everything is clean and homely and safe, completely different to the edge of risk she has felt for the entire time she has been away.

Henry is waiting up for her when she gets home, even though it's already after midnight and he has to be up early in the morning. He appears in the hallway almost as soon as Elizabeth has shut the door quietly behind her, a smile on his face and an eagerness in his expression that makes her heart melt as he strides quickly over to her and wraps her up in his arms, sweeping her off her feet and holding her close like he's trying to swallow her into himself.

Tears well up in her eyes as she wraps her arms around his shoulders and clings on. She's _so_ glad to see him, has missed him so much even though she hardly had time to think of home while she was away, so busy with her work that she was able to snatch only the briefest of phone calls and time to herself. It was a cruel twist of fate that sent her off overseas to Iraq only a couple of weeks after Henry arrived home from a deployment to that same place, and an even crueller irony that neither of them is allowed to say exactly what it was they were doing while they were there.

Finally settling her back to her feet, Henry slides his hand into her hair to encourage her to meet him in a kiss. Elizabeth obliges gladly, tasting salt as Henry's tongue enters her mouth – her tears or his?

She's not sure, doesn't really care. She lets herself get caught up in the kiss for several long, blissful minutes during which she is able to put the fraught trip out of her mind almost entirely. _Almost_.

The kiss eventually gentles and then breaks and Henry is cradling her face in his hands and looking at her like she's his whole world. "Hi, baby," he whispers. "I missed you."

"Hey." She smiles back at him and even though her vision is filled with her husband, her memory is filled with interrogations and arguments and dust and heat, and questions about what Henry did on his deployment, questions to which she has a few fragments of half-answers thanks to her own trip to the region, but questions that she knows she can never voice.

Henry tugs on her hand and leads her into their small living room, pulling her down to sit with him on the plush sofa that feels like bliss after days of uncomfortable beds and plane seats. "How was your trip?" he asks, an innocent question.

There is no innocent answer to give him. She can give him bland platitudes or she can give him a lie, but she can't give him the truth. At least not a truth that means all that much. "It was… challenging," she says, figuring that covers a multitude of sins.

His arm slides around her, pulling her into his chest. "How so?"

Elizabeth knows he's being deliberately careful, asking her questions that won't invite a necessary lie, but she can still feel the absence of truth weighing heavy on her. "It was a big responsibility. New people, new place."

 _New place – hot and dusty and close, the heat almost suffocating, her skin alternating between slicked with sweat and far too dry. So hot she couldn't drink enough water to compensate. Sand still in her clothes and her hair. A new place where even in the relatively controlled environment of the CIA base she stuck out as not from there. An entirely different landscape._

"How about the work? Did you get on OK?"

She burrows closer to Henry, pressing her cheek to his chest and wrapping her arm across his waist, finding the bulk of him reassuring. She thinks about what she can say – how much she can tell him without giving too much away. "Yeah. I mean I think so. I got some good results. Some good experience." She hesitates before saying the next bit but eventually figures there's nothing in the statement that breaks the rules. She needs to tell Henry what she can about what happened more than she needs to maintain complete silence. Needs to hear herself say the words out loud. Needs the support she knows he'll give. "I interrogated someone, questioned them. The intelligence I got stopped an attack."

Henry's pride is palpable – as is his curiosity. "That's great, babe. Congratulations." He presses a kiss to her hair, lingering there, and Elizabeth knows that it's taking everything he has not to ask her anything further.

She almost wishes that he would ask. She thinks she'd feel better if she could talk to him. Talking to him would help her make sense of it all, help her put things in perspective, make her feel secure again.

But she can't. Can't tell him the details of the interrogation, can't tell him about the guy she questioned, the guy who was shackled to a chair for her security but who still managed to make her feel decidedly nervy every time he moved. The guy who leered at her when she walked in like he'd hit the damn jackpot to be questioned by a woman so young she couldn't possibly be experienced in her work, who was so cocky to begin with but who turned vicious and personal in his responses as soon as he realised the woman questioning him knew her stuff, knew what she was doing, knew how to unsettle him. The guy who, when she stood up and leaned over the table the better impress a point upon him and he realised that he had given too much away, spat in her face.

Elizabeth can feel herself getting worked up again, the stress and the shock and the disgust surging up inside her after she had forced the feelings away at the time, forcing herself to focus on the job until it was done, always the professional operative. Now she's home it's hard to stop the emotion from flooding her, but she has to do something to stop it from overwhelming her. It's not fair on Henry to fall to pieces but then insist that she's fine because she isn't allowed to tell him why she's upset.

Instead she sits up, desperate for a distraction before it's too late. Henry looks at her, his face a picture of concern as he takes in what she guesses is the wild, not entirely controlled look in her eyes. "Elizabeth?" he says. "What is it?"

"Something true, right?" she questions. Urgent, needing. "I'm supposed to tell you something true."

Henry's hand brushes her hair softly back from her face. "Right," he agrees.

She thinks what she should say to him. She can still feel sand in her hair as his fingers stroke gently at her temple. She can still feel the heat even though she has showered since leaving and it's cool in their apartment. She can still feel the impact of a glob of spittle against her cheek as she broke the guy in the interrogation room. The pats on the back from her superiors as they congratulated her on a job well done and she had painted a smile on her face even as she wanted to run and hide for a while. The sound of bombs. One less bomb because of the work she had done, but what the hell difference does it make to the people who have died in explosions regardless?

Elizabeth surges forward and presses her lips to Henry's, her hands bunching in his t-shirt and her heart hammering against her ribs, the sound of it loud in her ears. Henry's hands catch her hips to hold her steady.

"Take my mind off it," she tells him. "I need you to take my mind off it. Please. I just… I _need_ you."

She doesn't give herself time to look at the worry on her husband's face before she kisses him again, giving herself over to his touch and thinking that the desperation with which she wants him is the truest thing she has let herself feel since she said goodbye to him ten days ago.

Something true… she's never going to forget that trip, but for Henry's sake she'll pretend she has.

* * *

 _Tell me something that's true._

 _I missed you._

 _You have toothpaste on your cheek._

 _Your hair is a mess._

 _Henry, I'm pregnant._

* * *

The house is a riot of noise and colour when she gets home, the space unable to contain the sound of small children shrieking and laughing and playing.

Elizabeth looks into the living room to see her three year-old daughter playing with a couple of her little friends from preschool, the television on but ignored as they run around the room in some strange child's make-believe game that she knows she'll never understand.

There has been a smile tugging at her lips the entire drive home from Langley, a combination of the success she has had at work today and the anticipation of getting back to her little family. Stevie's evening playdate is unexpected but not at all unwelcome – the smile on her daughter's face could eclipse the damn sun.

Elizabeth stands in the doorway for a minute longer until her daughter finally catches sight of her there, pausing only briefly in her game with her friends to wave and shout, "Hi, Mommy!"

She waves back, torn between going in there to scoop Stevie up in a big hug and staying at the edge to let her daughter continue her fun. "Hey, baby."

Stevie makes the decision for her, turning her back on her mother to re-join her friends, slotting seamlessly back into the game. Elizabeth feels a swell of pride for her child and the way she is already very much her own person.

She steps back to give the kids a three year-old's version of privacy, leaving the door open and keeping one ear out for any sound of trouble as she heads to the kitchen for a drink of water. She finds Henry already in there, peering into the oven to check the progress of the pizzas cooking inside.

"Evening, chef," she greets him, standing back a little to enjoy the sight of him from behind as he leans over the oven.

Henry flashes a smile over his shoulder. "Hey. You're back just in time for the pizza party. You have a good day?"

"I did," she says, unable to keep the beam out of her voice as she answers. She has had a _great_ day. It's a rarity in her job. She has days that are pretty decent, some that are satisfying or that she can chalk up as a win even in the midst of so much shit going on all around, but it's rare that she leaves so happy, that she has such a big result.

The enthusiasm of her response has Henry abandoning the oven to cross the kitchen to her, his arms slipping around her waist. "Oh, yeah?" He smiles down at her, his eyes crinkling as he enjoys the sight of her so pleased, instead of the air of stress that often surrounds her when she arrives home in the evening. "What happened?"

She can't tell him exactly what happened, can't tell him the story of how a trail of intelligence she has been following on and off for months, mostly just out of interest rather than because of any directive to do so, has unintentionally led to one of the biggest intelligence finds in years and, today, the subsequent arrest of several very high profile targets overseas and the foiling of a plot to bomb an embassy. She can't tell him, but this is one of those rare occasions when it's OK for her to give him a little nugget of information to help him better understand. "Oh, I can't tell you that," she says, giving him a teasing smile. "But I can tell you that I'm getting a promotion because of it."

Henry's eyebrows rise almost off his forehead and his face is full of unspoken admiration and pride. "That's amazing, babe. I'm so proud of you." He leans in to give her a kiss. "I promise I'll congratulate you properly later, but for now, you wanna celebrate with some toddlers and some pizza?"

"I'd love nothing more than that," she says. "That's the truth."

It is the easiest truth she has given in a while.

* * *

 _You want a truth?_

 _I can't believe how fast time is going._

 _This is really hard, sometimes._

 _Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever stop thinking about the things that have gone wrong… I feel like maybe more things go wrong than they used to._

* * *

Over the years, she has grown accustomed to the deaths.

It has never become normal, or acceptable, or any easier to deal with, but she has grown used to the way it feels when it happens. The sick feeling she gets when she hears of an operative lost overseas, or when she imagines the lives of each of the people who have been killed as a result of a bomb or attack or incident. The way they will never be just statistics to her, because she won't let them be.

It's different when it's children.

When she receives the report from operatives on the ground in Afghanistan, it takes her a few minutes to see it. She reads through the bulk of the report, which outlines a mission completed successfully, objective broadly achieved thanks to the intelligence analysis she provided. Then she reaches the almost cursory section towards the end, which details a brief firefight in the struggle to take down the target of the mission.

 _All operatives accounted for. Target subdued. Four civilian casualties; two minors included._

Elizabeth has to leave the office to stand outside for a while, letting the wind whip her hair around her face to obscure her tears.

She's off her game all day, and though she knows rationally that she couldn't have predicted exactly what would happen when the mission went down, they had gone in mostly on the basis of her intelligence. The civilian deaths are on her. Conrad Dalton doesn't even bother to try to tell her otherwise when she goes to see him for a meeting that afternoon, even though she can see that he wants to; he knows that she won't hear it. Instead, at the end of the meeting, he asks her a carefully-calculated question about her daughters' wellbeing, and after that all she can think about is seeing them and holding them and so she leaves work early for the day, pausing only to leave Henry a quick voicemail to say that she'll collect the girls today so there's no need for him to rush back from his last class of the day.

She knows full well that Conrad has played her to get her out of the office to spend time with her own children in the belief – or just the hope - that it will help her guilt, or at least assuage it for a little while, but she can't bring herself to care about the manipulation.

It doesn't help, though.

All she can think is that children are dying and, these days, even the wins feel like losses. The good days at work are fewer than they used to be. The world feels meaner than it did even a few short years ago. The losses are not worth the gains.

Elizabeth spends the afternoon with Stevie and Alison, throwing herself into whatever games they want to play, trying to soak up some of the natural joy on their little faces. It doesn't quite work, but she manages to pretend for a while. She feeds them dinner and feels genuine satisfaction at the sight of her children safe and secure and fed inside their warm home, and is inordinately glad that the life they know is so good compared to what it could be. She tries not to think about the guilt she feels that other people's children don't have what hers do.

That other people's children died in an operation backed by her intelligence.

Then Henry arrives home from the university and everything is a flurry of hugs and baths and bedtime, and then somehow it's two hours later and she's alone in the kitchen with her husband.

He slides a glass of wine to her across the counter. "Elizabeth?" he asks gently. "What is it?"

She thought she had done a good job of hiding it, but she should have known she can never hide what she is feeling from her husband. Tears well up in her eyes, frustration rising within her as she takes a drink of the wine. "I can't tell you," she says, hiding behind the secrecy mandated by her job.

It has been a while since it has been an issue, the fact that she can't tell him things about her work, but right now she can feel every millimetre of the gulf it automatically opens between them.

From the look on Henry's face, it seems that he feels it, too. "Something happened," he guesses.

She nods, because she can't deny it. "Yeah." A tear falls down her cheek and she wipes it angrily away. She doesn't deserve to cry, to feel sorry for herself. Not when her daughters are safe and sound upstairs in their beds while other people's children are dead because of her.

Henry closes the gap between them and softly takes her shoulders in his hands. He dips his head to kiss away the salty track left by her tear. "One true thing," he prompts. "Tell me something true."

The vehemence of her response surprises even herself. "There's _nothing_ I can tell you about this! Nothing I can say that won't make you think less of me." She pushes away from him and takes her wine glass to the other side of the kitchen table, needing some space between her and her husband, who is the best man she has ever known.

Suddenly she's glad that she can't tell him what happened today.

The shock on Henry's face takes a moment to dissipate. "I'm sure that's not true," he says, and he sounds as though he means it.

She doesn't answer, doesn't have anything good to say to him.

"I'll tell you something true," Henry says, picking up where she can't bring herself to do so. His face is full of love and for a moment Elizabeth is reminded that _this_ is all that matters. "I love you, Elizabeth. I love you, and our family, and I promise there's nothing that will ever change that."

She watches him, looking for even the slightest hint of doubt on his face, fails to find it. She thinks about the life they have built together, the life that is so good and the relationship that is so solid despite the secrets that because of their work, past and present, they are both obliged to keep. She thinks about their daughters, their clever, beautiful children who she already knows are going to do such great things in their lives. She thinks about how when she leaves the CIA at the end of each day, she comes home to the reason she keeps going.

The reason she keeps trying to make the world a better place, even if the battles to do so are getting harder and harder.

She wonders when it started to get so much harder, wonders if there's a way to make it even a tiny bit easier, even if only for a time.

She feels like a tide is turning, like there's only so much longer she can keep going with this job, with the secrets, with keeping things to herself. When she actually _wants_ to keep things to herself instead of telling every little thing to Henry like she did when she first started with the Company.

It's not quite the job that it was when she started.

But she thinks she can keep going a little while longer if she has enough reasons to do so.

So she tells Henry a truth she has been thinking about for a while, something she has been considering but hasn't been entirely sure about until now, something she thinks might help and something that she thinks he might just want, too. "I love you, too," she says. "And Henry, I think that we should go for three."

The happiness that lights up his face at her suggestion of another baby is enough to power her through the rest of the night without thinking once about the guilt and the secrets that threaten to eat her alive.

* * *

 _Something true…_

 _I love being a mom but sometimes it's nice to be at work. With adults. Doing adult things. Fixing things. You know. Things that don't involve princesses or pirates. Just sometimes. You know?_

 _I used to think I could save the world. Damn, I was so naïve. But still… I wish I could make it better. That's all I want. For our children._

 _The job… it's not what it used to be. I'm not entirely sure what we're trying to do anymore._

* * *

 _I'm quitting._

* * *

Her last day at the CIA. Her last time in this office, with these colleagues who are practically like family to her, these people with whom she has seen so much, who are the only people who really know what it is like, the things she has done, the lives she has saved, and the ones she hasn't.

Elizabeth thought she would feel sad as she handed back her security pass and left behind in the office anything that wasn't a personal item.

She doesn't feel sad.

Her husband is home alone when she gets back, something electronic scattered across the dining table as he tries to fix whatever it is Jason has broken this time. He looks up as she comes in and abandons his screwdriver to hold his hand out to her. "Hey, honey. Good last day?"

The question is deliberately light; the topic of her job has been somewhat fraught of late, after the offer she received to go and be station chief in Baghdad and the subsequent fight that it caused. Elizabeth still feels a hint of lingering resentment over the issue, but it isn't what she wants to focus on right now. She takes Henry's offered hand and lets him pull her down into his lap for a kiss and a hug, enjoying the feel of his arms strong around her, the honesty of the love he feels for her a constant throughout all of the secrets and arguments and things left unspoken.

She doesn't answer his question because she doesn't have a very good answer for it. She gives him another kiss instead and, when she pulls away, says, "I can't believe I start at UVA on Monday."

It will make quite a change, actually being able to talk to him about her work, to tell her husband when she gets home at the end of a long day exactly what it is that she did and the projects she is working on, to ask him to read drafts of her papers to get his opinion on what she's doing.

She thinks it will be nice to be normal for a while.

Maybe one day the secrets she keeps will even begin to feel like less, the guilt she still carries over so many things will start to gradually dissipate. Maybe. She hopes.

For now, she has one last confession for him, one last round of the agreement they share. "Something true," she says, sinking down further into his lap and trailing kisses up his face so that she can whisper into his ear.

It's the first truth she ever gave him when she started working at the CIA. The first and last, and everything in between. The thing that has made it worth it. The thing that has got them where they are. The thing that will carry them forward, no matter what.

She whispers her love for him into his ear.

It feels like a weight is lifting.


End file.
